You Make the Cube Voting

Now that the submission review process has wrapped up, voting for the You Make the Cube Contest is on until October 24 at 12:00 p.m. PT/7:00 p.m. UTC! The competing Cubes can be reviwed below and voting is taking place over on the Magic Online Twitter account. Look for the pinned tweet at the top of the page and cast your vote!

The winning submission will be announced on November 16 and the grand prize winner will receive four premium digital sets of Kaladesh and 1,000 Play Points! Get the full details here.

Quicklinks

Guillaume Matignon's Jenny's/Johnny's Cube

This is a synergistic cube, meaning players are encouraged to draft decks with synergies in them to perform well. Each color is associated with a tribe: respectively Clerics, Wizards, Zombies, Goblins, and Elves for white, blue, black, red, and green.

Moreover, there are overall themes associated with color combinations. Those themes mix with the tribal theme to create new archetypes.

I will provide a brief summary of the multicolor themes here:

Life gain plays well in any combination of white, black, or red. It rewards the player for gaining life and mixes well with the Cleric theme. There are a lot of ways to draft that archetype: aggressive with a Human sub-theme, combo with Sanguine Bond, or grindy control.

Mill is for blue and black; some Zombies are particularly fond of that theme.

Enchantment Reanimation is for blue, black, and white. You want a lot of enchantments there to achieve a maximum level of synergy.

Auras play well in white and green. This is the aggressive version of the enchantment deck. Who needs slow combos when you can attack with giant monsters?

Blue and red tempo rewards the player for playing instants and sorceries. There are additional benefits if you cast those spells from the graveyard.

If you want to mill yourself for fun and profit, it's possible in blue, black, and green. Delirium, free creatures from the graveyard, or a fast Emrakul are the advantages for doing so.

Artifact-themed decks will naturally be in blue and red. There it is possible to reanimate them easily.

Since such a cube can be overwhelming for drafters who aren't accustomed to the list, I tried to fit a healthy number of Cube staples, generally in the role of support cards. Those cards should be identifiable to all players and good in every deck of their color. For an example, Lightning Bolt is there, and it is as awesome in this cube as it is in any other. Those cards should help the draft process at the beginning. I tried to build the cube to allow the archetypes to mix as much as possible. The goal is to ensure a good level of replayability by permitting decks to be less linear. Also, as a Johnny player at heart, I want to have as many janky combos as possible in the cube. I tried to make said combos competitive in the Draft format.

Have fun looking at all the Cube lists and thanks for your vote if you choose my submission.

Eric Klug's Pro Tour Cube

The Pro Tour Cube is comprised of cards from Constructed Pro Tour winning decks. This includes old Worlds events where the Top 8 format was a Constructed one. In order to adhere to a 540 card limit I have excluded ~300 cards to both balance colors and cut cards not well suited for the Cube format (e.g. Cranial Extraction). I have also excluded any sideboard cards. While this cube make look normal at a glance, it is anything but. The gameplay is more unique and exciting than all “normal” cubes I’ve had the pleasure to draft; a mixture of slight familiarity, Magic history, and creative deck building.

Simonot Timothée's Twisted Color Pie

Why are all Cube decks are the same?

I played Cubes built by local players at my shop, I played Cubes built by GP grinders across Europe and I played Cubes built by World Champions during Pro Tours. All these players like Cubes and original Magic experience, but it doesn't matter how many cards you change, how good the players are or what power level you support: all Cubes can be drafted the same way and the decks always feel the same.

What I'd like to achieve with this design challenge is to offer an original way to enjoy the five colors. I want to create new Cube feelings by getting away from what makes all Cube similar: the Color Pie.

Origin of the idea:

Most of the time, both Constructed and Limited decks respect the Color Pie: Red attacks fast, Blue excels at slowing games and Green is about mana acceleration...

But, once in a while, we see a MonoBlue aggro deck winning a Pro Tour, a BigRed that turn to be the best control strategy or a White-Green deck with a fantastic late game.

Players love these unusual strategies, but those are quite rare when it comes to Cube. It's logic considering how most Cubes are built: all colors get their best weapons. The Color Pie is mechanically respected and that's why all decks from all Cube have the same playstyle.

The path I explored to submit an innovative list and propose a different way to enjoy Cube, is to change how the colors feel by preventing them from doing what they do best.

Build choices:

White isn't about Wrath or small aggressive guys, Blue can't really control the game and Red misses its beloved Goblin guide. Each color has one or two main themes and a minor theme.

The balance is almost respected. I counted all gold cards as 0,5 card for each of its colors, I placed cards like Proteus Staff in the Blue pile and I considered that Red players should draft more artifacts than others.

As Wrath, Counterspell and Birds of Paradise are out, new staples emerge. Starfield of Nyx is everything White wants to do, Cryptbreaker leads to many archetypes and Basilisk Collar is the best tool for a pingers deck.

To ensure archetype diversity and replayability, there's many “build around me” and hidden gems. Vedalken Mastermind interacts nicely with Shriekmaw's evoke and Standstill. Mass polymorphism is the perfect follow up for Aether mutation, and Mesmeric Orb can power crazy Scrap Mastery or Kessig Cagebreaker turns!

This design exercise was both a challenge and a blast, I hope you like the twisted axis I took!

Joseph Vasoli's Common Uncommon Cube

A peasant cube, all cards have been printed at un/common at some point, includes online only sets. The cube is color balanced, dismember is colorless, etc. All colors support aggro/midrange/control, lots of sweet interactions. There is archetype supports for some decks beside general goodstuff like blue-red spells or black-white sacrifice.

The best performing decks based on my 360 peasant this was based off are black-white aggro/tokens and blue-green ramp. All colors are about equally good. I've been peasant cubing for something like 6+ years now and have done a ton of iterations to get to this point. I know that there are a lot of cheap 1-3 drop creatures but, as I'm sure you know, to make aggro good you really need to do a lot to support it. I'm proud to say aggro is good in this cube despite not having any amazing rare cards.

The weirdest choice is probably only playing the blue non-green signets. Blue decks are almost always control or midrange, though aggro ones exist, so they want signets a much higher % of the time than other color combos. Green-blue however doesn't need more ramp spells, so it doesn't get a signet.

Same deal with bouncelands although green-blue gets one of those. I'd say my favorite card it probably Pelakka Wurm, it's an all-star in the green ramp archetype. Green is maybe the only color I'd say isn't aggro but a curve of elf into some 3 power creature into BBE is pretty beatdown so those decks do exist. Thanks for your time reading this.